Reimagining the Brontës: (Post)Feminist Middlebrow Adaptations and Representations of Feminine Creative Genius, 1996- 2011. Catherine Paula Han Submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Literature) Cardiff University 2015 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Ann Heilmann for her unflagging enthusiasm, kindness and acuity in matters academic and otherwise for four years. Working with Professor Heilmann has been a pleasure and a privilege. I am grateful, furthermore, to Dr Iris Kleinecke-Bates at the University of Hull for co-supervising the first year of this project and being a constant source of helpfulness since then.
I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Professor Judith Buchanan at the University of York, who encouraged me to pursue a PhD and oversaw the conception of this thesis. I have received invaluable support, moreover, from many members of the academic and administrative staff at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, particularly Rhian Rattray. I am thankful to the AHRC for providing the financial support for this thesis for one year at the University of Hull and for a further two years at Cardiff University. Additionally, I am fortunate to have been the recipient of several AHRC Research and Training Support Grants so that I could undertake archival research in the UK and attend a conference overseas.
This thesis could not have been completed without access to resources held at the British Film Institute, the BBC Written Archives and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. I am also indebted to Tam Fry for giving me permission to quote from correspondence written by his father, Christopher Fry. I would also like to thank the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art and Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant for allowing me to reproduce their images in this thesis. To write this thesis, I have relied on a network of friends in ENCAP and beyond.
Many of them were sources of intellectual stimulation and insight but, more importantly, they offered me cups of tea, snacks and sympathetic ears during my moments of need. As repayment for their generosity, I have ensured that these individuals now know more about the Brontës than they ever thought possible. I am very lucky to know such people. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their encouragement and largesse over the last four years and for many years before that.
Without them, I could not have finished—nor even begun—this thesis. i Abstract Investigating conceptualisations of the feminine creative imagination, this thesis examines representations of the Brontës and adaptations of their novels released between 1996 and 2011. I focus on portrayals of Charlotte and Anne Brontë alongside reworkings of Jane Eyre (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in various media. Contributing to existing research on the cultural afterlives of the Brontës and their novels, I position the works discussed within contemporary middlebrow culture whilst considering the influence of feminism.
The Introduction discusses the gendering of creative genius before identifying the tensions between critical, middlebrow and popular discourses’ conceptualisations of the Brontës’ imaginations. Thereafter, the first chapter proposes the contemporary usefulness and considers the gendering of the concept of the middlebrow. I demonstrate that middlebrow culture is fascinated by the Brontës’ lives, art and feminine creative imaginations. To further this argument, the second chapter analyses neo-Victorian novels’ engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life, art and creativity.
I illustrate that these works draw from second-wave feminist criticism on Jane Eyre and belong to a tradition of middlebrow feminine writing about the Brontës. The third chapter also examines representations of feminine creativity and discusses how screen adaptations portray the artistry of Jane Eyre’s heroine. Additionally, the legacies of second-wave feminism in a wider postfeminist cultural context are explored. In the fourth chapter, the thesis turns to analyse the cultural dissemination and reputations of Anne Brontë and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
I delineate how middlebrow culture has rediscovered the youngest Brontë, her novel and her feminism. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined indicate middlebrow culture’s efforts to engage with feminism through the feminine creative imagination. Yet these works expose a prevailing tension in feminism between the status of the individual and the collective. ii Contents List of figures p.
1 Original Contribution to the Field(s) p. 10 Romantic and Victorian Conceptualisations of Genius p. 18 Twentieth-Century Reconceptualisations of Feminine Creativity p. 32 Outline of Thesis Chapters p.
38 Chapter 1 The Brontës and Middlebrow Culture p. 42 The Dissolving Boundaries of Contemporary Culture? p. 45 Defining the Middlebrow p. 50 The Neo-Victorian Middlebrow p.
68 Adaptation and the Middlebrow p. 84 The BBC, Costume Drama Adaptations and the Middlebrow p. 103 Chapter 2 Readerly Pleasure and the Feminine Creative Imagination: Neo-Victorian Representations of Charlotte Brontë p. 106 Becoming Jane Eyre: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Second-Wave Feminism p.
112 Daphne: The Gendered Middlebrow and Creative Feminine Readers p. 125 Charlotte: Waves of Feminist Lies p. 156 Chapter 3 Jane Eyre on Screen: Postfeminist Pleasures and the Feminine Creative Imagination p. 162 Costuming Jane Eyre p.
173 iii Jane Eyre (ITV, telefilm, 1997): Postfeminist Individualism p.185 Jane Eyre (Franco Zeffirelli, 1996): Creative (Dis)Empowerment p. 192 Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011): Creative Pleasures p. 203 Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006): Creative Retreat p. 229 Chapter 4 Anonymous Anne and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Cultural Marginalisation and Feminist Rediscovery p.
237 Adapting The Tenant of Wildfell Hall p. 247 Feminine Creativity in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall p. 262 Reading and Hearing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall p. 305 iv List of Figures Figure 1.
Reed Family Tableau. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006). Rochester Family Tableau. Episode 4, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006).
Ruth Wilson as Jane Eyre. Episode 2, Jane Eyre (BBC2, 2006). Picture Library, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, c. “The Brontë Sisters”.
National Portrait Gallery, London, 1833-4. Emma Lowndes as Mary Rivers and Annabel Scholey as Diana Rivers. Episode 4, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006). National Portrait Gallery.
Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1944) Figure 9. Charlotte Gainsborough as Jane Eyre. Samantha Morton as Jane Eyre.
Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre. Christina Cole as Blanche Ingram. Episode 2, Jane Eyre (BBC2, 2006). Jane’s portrait of Blanche Ingram.
Episode 2, Jane Eyre (BBC2, 2006).” Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth. Abigail Cruttenden as Blanche Ingram plays the piano with Ciarán Hinds as Rochester. Abigail Cruttenden as Blanche Ingram plays charades with Ciarán Hinds as Rochester. Jane’s watercolours on display.
Jane’s portrait of Rochester. Michael Fassbender as Rochester displays Jane’s watercolour. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1820. Judi Dench as Mrs Fairfax and Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre stand at the window.
Book illustration examined by Jane. Romy Settbon Moore as Adèle and Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre look at an illustration together. Georgie Henley as a young Jane Eyre fantasises about a desert landscape. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006).
Illustrations from Voyages and Travels Illustrated. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006). The young Jane’s sketchbook. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006).
The adult Jane’s sketchbook. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006). Illustration from volume of natural history. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006).
Ruth Wilson as Jane Eyre sits in Rochester’s study. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006). Cosima Littlewood as Adèle performs her accomplishments. Episode 1, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006).
Cosima Littlewood as Adèle in the final scene of the adaptation. Episode 4, Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006). Kate Beaton, “Dude Watchin’ with the Brontës”, Hark! A Vagrant, 2009. Toby Stephens as Gilbert Markham travelling to Grassdale.
Episode 3, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC, 1996). Tara Fitzgerald as Helen Huntingdon at Scarborough. Episode 3, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC, 1996). Holly Hunter as Ada returns to her piano.
Tara Fitzgerald as Helen Huntingdon and Toby Stephens as Gilbert Markham at Winley Bay. Episode 1, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC, 1996). Neck of Tara Fitzgerald as Helen Huntingdon. Episode 1, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC, 1996).
Neck of Holly Hunter as Ada. vii Introduction In their most famous novels, Charlotte and Anne Brontë contemplate and offer differing perspectives upon the feminine creative imagination. 1 In CB’s Jane Eyre (1847), the governess-protagonist presents her new employer Edward Rochester with her watercolour portfolio in their first official meeting. Although she deems her images to be “nothing wonderful”, her account of her inspiration and creative methods alerts us to the extraordinariness of her imagination.
2 According to Jane, the subjects in her paintings had “risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye before I attempted to embody them, they were striking”.3 Her description clarifies that she draws upon internalised forms of inspiration and refuses to be constrained by her amateur status. Despite pointing out Jane’s deficiencies, Rochester appears titillated by her creative visions. He ponders that she must have withdrawn into “a kind of artist’s dreamland” and observes that “the drawings are, for a schoolgirl, peculiar.”4 As his remarks make clear, her paintings intrigue him as expressions of her selfhood and evidence of her originality and genius.
A competing conceptualisation of the feminine creative imagination can be found in AB’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). 5 The contrast between the two novels becomes apparent in the scene where Gilbert Markham visits the heroine, Helen Huntingdon, and learns that she is a professional painter. As Gilbert surveys the heroine’s artworks, he recognises “a view of Wildfell Hall, as seen at early morning from the field below” that is 1 For the purposes of clarity, this thesis will refer to the historical members of the Brontë family by their initials unless I am discussing a fictionalised version of them, in which case I will use their first name. 2 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed.
Dunn, 3rd ed. 3 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 107. 4 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 108. 5 Hereafter, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall will be referred to as Wildfell Hall.
1 “faithfully drawn and coloured, and very elegantly and artistically handled.”6 His description makes us aware of the verisimilitude of Helen’s painting and the fact that, unlike Jane, she deploys external sources of inspiration. Unable to glean insight into Helen’s character from her work, Gilbert makes sexual advances towards her that are less successful than Rochester’s flirtations with Jane. The dissimilarities between the two heroines underscore that Helen creates to earn a living and does not seek an outlet for her originality or genius in the same manner as Jane. In contradistinction to Jane Eyre and Wildfell Hall, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) does not feature a female protagonist who practises any form artistic expression and the “few artistic activities described in the novel are ephemeral”.7 Despite their differences, the three Brontë sisters have become synonymous with the feminine creative imagination and genius in contemporary culture.
As Lucasta Miller points out, the sisters’ reputation has shifted “in the collective unconscious from the level of history onto that of myth.” 8 One of the most significant aspects of this myth is the perceived enigma of the Brontës’ creative imaginations. Only half ironically, Polly Teale’s play Brontë (2005) opens with the three main characters pondering: EMILY: How did it happen? ANNE: How was it possible? CHARLOTTE: Three Victorian spinsters living in isolation on the Yorkshire moors. It’s hard to believe that they really dressed like this, for walking on the moors, carrying in coal, scrubbing floors. ANNE: Writing books.9 The same question is posed in the 2013 documentary “The Brilliant Brontë Sisters” when the presenter Sheila Hancock asks: “How did three spinsters who spent most of their life [sic] in a 6 Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed.
7 Jane Sellars, “Art and the Artist as Heroine in the Novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë”, Brontë Studies 20, no. 8 Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2002), x. 9 Polly Teale, Brontë, rev.
